“ Then we concentrate on the lighted rooms upstairs.”
“ Turning on lights as we go.”
They started up the stairwell, guns in ready position.
SWANTOR held his ex-wife in the shadows, his hand over her mouth in the kitchen, listening to the intruders. When he heard them going upstairs, he ushered Lara toward the back door, keeping his hand tightly over her mouth. Still bleeding from his wrist, Swantor forced Lara through the door, and seeing someone in a yellow rain slicker with a rifle outside, he shoved Lara out into the storm.
The guardsman rushed to save the nude woman, relaxing his carbine rifle in order to tear off his yellow rain slicker, placing it over her shoulders. The guard failed to see Swantor, who opened fire and killed him just as he placed the raincoat over the woman's shoulders. The single shot sent the man to his knees where he momentarily clung to Mrs. Swantor before going to his belly. This sent an array of shrill cries up from Lara Swantor, enough to overcome the wind.
Swantor then raced out to her, grabbed her and covered her mouth with a palm still covered in blood that had spilled from his wrist.
“ That bastard boyfriend of yours cut me good,” he said into her ear, feeling feint from the blood loss. “Now let's get to the boathouse. Mr. Kenyon's waiting on us. Don't want him to grow impatient.”
Just as he said this, he heard a new roar in the wind and instantly felt something bite into the back of his skull. He turned to come eye-to-eye with Grant/Phillip Kenyon, realizing as he fell dead that somehow Kenyon had gotten free. His last thought was of not finishing his film.
“ Oh, thank God you've stopped him!” cried out Lara Swantor, whose eyes only now met Kenyon's. She saw a strange lust in the man's pupils, and she saw the still whirring bone saw. Instinctively, she pulled away. “You're Kenyon. You're the Skull-digger!” She turned and ran in the slippery mud, fleeing him.
Kenyon grabbed up Swantor's gun when a shot rang out, and he felt the bullet bite off a piece of his ear. He rushed at Mrs. Swantor as she attempted to get away, still wearing the open yellow raincoat. He caught her, grabbed her by the arm, and dragged her toward a steep drop-off at the rear of the house. Kenyon then shoved her down the gully and watched as the yellow raincoat made an easy visible target.
From below in the gully, Lara Swantor felt a cold desperation infiltrate her mind along with the chill to her body-and, as she rolled down into the depths of the black swampy area in this backwater ravine, she recalled how often Jervis had warned her of alligators on the prowl all along here. How he meant to feed her to them one day. Apparently, he had found a human alligator to do the job for him.
Grant dropped into the ravine as well, a second bullet from an upstairs window whistling directly at him, striking his right forearm and sending him rolling down the gully after Mrs. Swantor.
The second bullet had gone clean through him, leaving pain but little blood.
He picked himself up and rushed after Mrs. Swantor, his bone cutter in hand. “One last meal before they kill we,” Phillip said to Grant. But Mrs. Swantor had had a sudden burst of energy fueled by fear, and she was getting away. He saw the yellow color darting in and out of trees and brush. Behind him, he saw lights approaching and heard the others chasing him.
EIGHTEEN
All evils art equal when they art extreme.
Jessica and Sorrento had heard the shouting from above, Konrath's voice; the tone meant he was delivering orders or demands. They had seen him at the front door, and they'd seen O'Hurley break in the glass and tear the door open. Something had happened. But by the time Jessica and Sorrento arrived at the front door, Konrath and O'Hurley had vanished. Jessica announced their arrival, calling for Konrath as they bounded up the porch and into the foyer.
They'd been instantly hit with the sight of the dead man lying in the foyer, obviously having fallen from above. Jessica kneeled for a moment, trying to identify him as Swantor or Kenyon. It was neither man. “Someone in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“ Looks like overkill.”
“ Or Kenyon's work.”
“ Konrath!” shouted Sorrento. “O'Hurley!”
They heard a gunshot coming from the rear of the house. This was followed by two additional gunshots originating from upstairs. They heard O'Hurley shout, “I think I got the bastard! LaPlante's down!”
“ The rear!” shouted Jessica, going for the back of the house. Sorrento slipped on the dead man's blood; not slowing, Jessica raced ahead of him, gun pointed.
When Jessica made it to the back door off the kitchen, she saw the two dead men lying out in the rain. She rushed out to where the two men lay in the blood-soaked grass. Jessica saw the youthful face of the man in the Coast Guard uniform, his nametag proclaiming him LaPlante, dead of a clean gunshot wound through the heart. The other man was tall and hefty, and the back of his skull was grinning with a gaping wound like the one they had seen on Sheriff Potter, but this wound to the back of the skull had been washed clean by the rain.
Sorrento was beside her now, doing his own assessment of the situation. With Mike's help, she turned the body and stared into the face of Jervis Swantor. “One down, one to go,” she said through gritted teeth. “It's Swantor.”
Sorrento and Jessica crouched over the bodies in the storm, their weapons pointed, but they had no target, and they were exposed. The two agents scoured the landscape for any sign of Kenyon and Mrs. Swantor. They saw no one.
Konrath came racing from the house, going to his knees over the young guardsman, LaPlante. “Oh, Christ! No, no!”
O'Hurley followed, saying, “He's got the woman! I got two shots off from the upstairs window. I'm sure I hit him.”
Konrath bellowed, “O'Hurley, which way did the bastard go?”
“ They went straight down, just as if they were swallowed up by the earth,” said O'Hurley. “There's got to be a steep drop-off right out there, maybe sixty yards. She's wearing LaPlante's raincoat. The man's wearing dark clothing.”
“ Let's get this bastard before he feeds again,” said Jessica, her teeth set. She grabbed her flashlight and beamed it toward the area O'Hurley's own light sought out. The men followed suit, and they spread out along the drop off, shining their lights at the dark hole into which Kenyon had crawled, taking his prey with him, like some beast out of the scriptures.
They tentatively made their way in the slippery undergrowth for about ten minutes before Jessica's flash picked up a slight movement and the color yellow in the for distance. “There! There she is. Come on!”
They carefully negotiated the incline, when a shot rang out, a bullet whistling past them. This made O'Hurley fall and tumble, sending up a bevy of frightened quail and shattering his ankle on impact against a tree. “Son of a bitch.” He moaned.
First Mate Konrath ordered everyone to discard their slickers, realizing they presented too much of a target. Konrath then tended to O'Hurley while Jessica and Sorrento went toward the yellow marker, where they hoped to find the woman.
They fought tough, jagged underbrush, palmetto bush and gnarled branches that cut their hands and faces just to win a foothold on the riverbank where the yellow coat winked again and again at them like a lure.
Jessica whispered in Sorrento's ear, “Do you see it, the raincoat?”
“ Could be there to decoy us in, a trap,” he replied.
“ What do you suggest?”
“ I walk into the trap… you cover me,” he told her.
“ No, I walk in, you cover me.”
“ Not in this life.”
“ Then we go in together.”
“ We don't have that option,” he insisted.
“ Look, if he hasn't killed her already, this may be our only chance of flushing him out before he does.”